Discovery of the 8th element – Element R

I am so blind. After more than 20 years in the industry, I have chosen to be blind to one of the most important elements of data protection and availability. Yet, I have been talking about it over and over, and over again but never really incorporated it into mantra.

Some readers will know that I frequently use these 7 points (or elements) in my approach to storage infrastructure and information management. These are:

• Availability
• Performance
• Protection
• Accessibility
• Management
• Security
• Compliance

A few days ago, I had an epiphany. I woke up in the morning, feeling so enlightened and yet conflicted with the dumbfounded dumb feeling. It was so weird, and that moment continued to play in my mind like a broken record. I had to let it out and hence I am writing this down now.

Element R – Recovery, Resiliency, Restorability, Resumption. That’s the element which I “discovered“. I was positively stunned that I never incorporated such an important element in my mantra, until now.

Many years ago, a good friend of mine (Sean, this is you I am talking about) spoke about changing the name of a backup appliance into a restore appliance. He even said that the restore appliance should be painted with a glossy white colour which is similar to Apple devices, because it was great marketing. After all, all backups were useless if restore failed.

I was also certified as a Business Continuity Planner several years ago in order to qualify myself for a DR project. The project was for an Oil & Gas company here in Malaysia, involving the design and implementation of the HP Enterprise Vault (repackaged Asigra) for the customer’s HP EVA440 to HP’s remote data center 40km away from the Petronas Twin Towers. The project was significantly large with a 5-year term, and I recalled vividly that it cost the customer RM70K/TB/year. It was rather nonsensical number at the time, because the customer insisted that it has to be HP EV, and they dictated what components to be used. HP was gleefully rubbing their grubby hands with the sale and my team and I had to work with what we got.

Anyway, story aside, the R element was there right in front of my eyes but it never chanced on me that I should put it into the gang of 7. Perhaps it was always inserted into Availability or Protection but I won’t use that as my excuse for being so dumb.

So I welcome Element R into my mantra and make it A.P.P.A.R.M.S.C. I feel good now getting this off my chest.

Since we are on the topic of Recovery, Resiliency, Restorability and Resumption, I would like to share that BCI (Business Continuity Institute) Malaysia Forum will be having an event called “How to rise to the resilience challenge” on October 22nd 2015 in Malaysia. You can register yourself here.